Georgia on Their Minds: Rethinking the Role of Geographic Scale in U.S. Elections

In electoral studies, geographical scale is analogous to the unit or level of analysis studied. The national scale is typically the one most privileged. Regional and local variations are entirely determined by the relative geographical distribution of, for instance, national demographic categories such as age, ethnicity, or levels of education and income around national means. Such categories are also considered to be identical across a polity, and deviations from the national average are the focus of many electoral analyses. We contend that the processes that produce electoral outcomes are funneled across and between scales. Such inter-scale exchanges can range from different political parties emphasizing local, regional, and national identities and interests to local livelihoods feeling threatened by global economic forces or illegal immigration. It is this inter-scale exchange of social, economic, political, and cultural processes, identities and attitudes that produce substantively different electoral outcomes in different places, and not mere deviations from the determinate national average. Results from the 2022 Georgia senate runoff election between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker are examined with exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and multi-level regression modeling (MLM) to illustrate how a more complete conception of geographic scale is implicated in electoral outcomes.